No matter how misguided his intention, director Ridley
Scott (Hannibal, Gladiator) has always had an eye for astounding
visuals.

Black Hawk Down pummels your senses and punches your
gut by restaging a battle so savage and brutal it is almost poetic.

Despite his attempts to present an unflinching blow-by-blow account of the
botched 1993 U.S. mission in Mogadishu, Somalia, all Scott's new war movie
achieves is some pretty spectacular images -- and little else.

Unless endless scenes of blown-off limbs and exposed entrails do it for you,
this movie is as pointless and noisy as it gets. Fingers explode, limbs fly,
torsos get blown away.

Based on a non-fiction bestseller by journalist Mark Bowden, Black Hawk
Down chronicles the events of
Oct, 3 1993
when a group of elite
U.S
. soldiers -- part of a United Nations peacekeeping force in war-torn
Somalia
-- is tasked with capturing several aides of warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid.

The mission goes horribly wrong and what’s supposed to have been a
90-minute raid becomes a hellishly violent 17-hour battle between the commandos
and thousands of Somali militiamen.

Marked with lines like: “Nobody asks to be a hero; it
just sometimes turns out this way,” Black Hawk Down aims to tell of the
nightmare that elite American troops found themselves in after two Black Hawk
helicopters crashed in the Somalia capital during the mission.

Why the angry retaliation, we never know. All we know of
the “skinnies” (that’s emaciated Somalis in army-speak) are that they’re
heavily armed, often appear in dangerous hordes and negotiate by killing.

Not that we know much about the characters from the other side either.

Most of them are fleeting caricatures. You never know them enough to actually
recognize them when they appear on screen. With faces smudged with sweat and
grime, the characters are almost indistinguishable.

Try playing 'where’s Ewan McGregor?' and you’ll get what I mean.

Seriously, I could only spot him while making or talking coffee.

Josh Hartnett, the much-hyped star of the show, is still a B-list actor
despite his forays into
Pearl Harbor
and O.

So we know next to nothing about the battle that was being fought, barely
nothing about the men from either side, and absolutely no reason why Scott
undertook this project unless to transport audiences directly into the hellscape.

As one character sagely puts it: “Once that first bullet goes past your
head, politics and all that shit just goes out the window.”

However, at the end of the 144 minutes, the only thing you
learn about one of the U.S. Army’s most bitter engagements is that 18
Americans and thousands of Somalis died in a battle this film doesn’t bother
to explain.